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Bullets to the Rescue

Written by: Max Kalles

Article Overview: If your web site copy is too "chunky", you might be losing visitors. It's time to use bullets.

Bullets to the Rescue

After recently being a guest at a SME networking meeting, I thought I would check the web sites listed on the business cards I had gathered. The most remarkable thing was that not everyone had a web site, or didn’t bother to list it on their business card. In either case, this is so unacceptable in today’s marketplace that it is not worth discussing. It would be like telling you why you should list your telephone number.

Moving beyond the obvious faux pas, it was striking how many sites still featured large blocks of text. Web developers call it “chunky” text and readers find it daunting. Unless they have a deep interest in the subject, your web visitors will probably not read much chunky text, if any. Surfers have short attention spans. There is also a good chance they are multitasking on the web – waiting for something to download, chatting, surfing, etc.. The vast majority of those who visit your site quickly want to find the information they seek. When confronted by long, unbroken paragraphs, they will most often go looking elsewhere, and they might never return.

If you check your site and find that it features lots of chunky text, don’t panic, not all is lost. You won’t need to re-write everything from scratch. You simply need to “rescue” your text from its chunky format and there’s few better ways to do that than by using a few bullets.

The information in bulleted text is easier for fast surfing clients to consume. Just the sight of bullets encourages surfers to scan, which is their natural way of searching web content.

Shortening your paragraphs will also make the copy less daunting to the reader. More paragraph spaces increases the “white space” in your copy, which makes it feel easier to read.

Adding an image or two is a good idea. We all like looking at pictures and, if you choose them well, you can get a full thousand words out of each one.

An ideal piece of web copy would incorporate a variety of techniques to increase its appeal to surfers. A short introductory paragraph that encourages readers to move onto a few bullets, along with an image to break it all up, will always work better than chunks.

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Article Tags: marketing mistakes, poor websites, web page conversion strategies



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